Why I am grateful to John Coates (for his insulting treatment of Queensland’s most powerful woman)

Look, I am really grateful to John Coates. He gave a masterclass in how to be an arrogant powerbroker when he schooled Brisbane 2032 Olympic bid-winning Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk at a late-night press conference in Tokyo.

Palaszczuk, who went to Tokyo to cheer on her city’s successful bid, was determined not to attend the Tokyo opening ceremony. For all the good reasons.

She didn’t want to look like she was on a junket when most of Australia is in miserable lockdown. She doesn’t want to catch COVID-19 in a Games already beset with viruses other than STIs. And she wanted to look responsible.

Of course, the way Coates now tells it, she secretly wanted to go.

But the Australian Olympic Committee president wasn’t having any humility on his stage and at his party. In front of the world, he said: “You are going to the opening ceremony [Coates leaning back and folding his arms, audience laughing because apparently a senior woman being rebuked by a dinosaur is hilarious] . . . I am still the deputy chair of the candidature leadership group . . . there will be an opening and a closing ceremony in 2032 and all of you have got to get along there and understand the traditional parts of that, what’s involved in an opening ceremony.”

John Coates, president, Australian Olympic Committee, with Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk at announcement in Tokyo on Wednesday night of the 2032 Brisbane Games.Credit: Getty Images

And he said it in the tone of voice with which all of us who have ever been bullied by our bosses will be familiar. He was playful. He was “joking”. It was going to be his way or the highway.

Late on Thursday, Coates rang the Herald’s Andrew Webster to say the Queensland Premier confided she was in a tough spot. She had made all these promises. He told Webster he agreed to fix it. His version of fixing it was humiliating the premier of Queensland. If that’s fixing it, I’d rather it remained broken.

Perhaps this was planned. Perhaps Palaszczzuk wanted to go or knew she should. But there are ways and means to do what Coates did.

So why am I grateful for his behaviour? For the past, I dunno, millennium, men – not all men – have demeaned and degraded women repetitively, continuously, relentlessly. Women have been told to put up with it. Told that we have no sense of humour. That we take things too seriously. That we don’t get how things “are done around here”.

Those conversations are always made invisible and women internalise the criticism. They think, ah, maybe I just don’t get the joke. But there are no jokes, just a desire for control. Which is what Coates made visible when he dressed down the most powerful woman in Queensland. Now Palaszczuk has bowed to Coates’ pressure and will go to the opening ceremony.

I asked Geoff Dickson, director of the Centre for Sport and Social Impact at La Trobe University, what he thought of Coates’ behaviour. He too sees Coates schooling Palaszczuk: “He was effectively telling her, in public, she was ignorant of Olympic history and protocol and he had to upskill her.”

That was also, he says, a way of bundling the Queensland Premier onto the Olympic gravy train, in a way which doesn’t make it look like it was her decision.

When Palaszczuk responded to Coates, she did so in a way which made Australian women sit back and sigh with disappointment. She said: “I don’t want to offend anybody.”

It’s always the way. Women don’t want to offend. So they shut up and laugh along. Kill me. (To be honest, I backed the Premier attending the Games and she should definitely be attending the opening ceremony because it’s a hell of a thing to see. But Coates could have done this behind closed doors. He didn’t need to parade his dominance).

“The problem is that women politicians are always in a double bind,” says Carol Johnson, Australia’s foremost scholar on political leadership and one of the authors in Gender Politics: navigating political leadership in Australia. “If they stand up to men who have treated them inappropriately they are seen as being aggressive and difficult but if they don’t stand up, they aren’t calling out the behaviour.”

I wasn’t looking for a reprise of Julia Gillard’s misogyny speech but I would have loved Palaszczuk to appropriate a little: “I will not be lectured by this powerbroker. I will not.” One more burden, the burden of silence, would have lifted from the shoulders of women everywhere.

Jenna Price is a visiting fellow at the Australian National University and a regular columnist. She also has a chapter in Gender Politics, published by UNSW Press.